Delivery App Perks Up Coffee Sales

By: Inbound Logistics

Elaine S. Silver*

Change was brewing at coffee roaster Segafredo Zanetti France. While its salesforce mobile application worked fairly well, customer expectations for instantaneous information and real-time supply availability had the coffee merchant seeking to caffeinate its current system.

The legacy system had been in place for nine years. Salespeople and delivery drivers sold and distributed Italian coffee in bars, hotels, and restaurants all over France using Symbol PDA MC9094 devices connected to SAP Business One (SBO) back-office software. In 2015, approximately 4,000 customers received coffee shipments each week, delivered from Segafredo warehouses around the country.

But using the legacy system created many challenges for Segafredo's salespeople. "We knew we had to make the sellers' job easier, faster, and more interactive," says Jean-Francis Caharel, project director, Segafredo Zanetti France, a subsidiary of the Massimo Zanetti Beverage Group, an espresso producer with a presence in more than 100 countries. "We also needed new functions that we couldn't develop on the Symbol PDA because the operating system (OS) was old and did not have sufficient memory."

Another issue was the system's inability to synchronize data without transfering files. Salespeople and drivers spent too much time waiting to get and give information. And the sellers needed a solution that could provide information even when the system was offline or out of connection range.

"We needed more interactive data transfers," Caharel explains. "The old OS had reached the limits of available memory, and synchronizing data took too long. Our salesforce lost time to technical problems, and began to ask for new devices."

Segafredo's in-house, four-person IT team took on the task of determining how to address these issues. They sought a solution that would quickly and cost effectively integrate the company's back-office SBO software with an up-to-date mobile solution. Enter French mobile IT provider Danem.

Since 1996, Danem has been designing and marketing mobile solutions that integrate the relationships between a company's customers, field staff, and office. Danem currently supports more than 300 companies with about 10,000 end users in industries as diverse as food processing, construction, maintenance, and healthcare.

MAGIC PARTNERSHIP

Segafredo considered four solution options before selecting Danem and Magic Software's integration platform, Magic xpi. One contender did not have a French integrator to work with. Segafredo rejected another system because it seemed too complex. And it passed on the third possibility because the solution was too expensive and time-consuming to integrate.

Magic and Danem had established a relationship on a previous project, and adding Segafredo into the blend went smoothly. "We worked with Danem as if they were colleagues," says Caharel. "The relationship was comfortable, agile, and efficient."

"System implementation time generally depends on integrating controls and extracting the necessary files from the back-end information system—for Segafredo it was SAP Business One, its enterprise resource planning system," says Michel Sasportas, managing director at Danem. "The contribution of Magic's experience and Magic xpi's real-time exchange capabilities from Business One to the mobile application was a crucial factor in implementation success."

"Connecting to back-end systems is typically the most time-consuming part of creating enterprise mobile apps," explains Dominique Berger, sales manager, Magic France. Magic's prebuilt native adapter, which was certified for Segafredo's enterprise system, mitigated the time-eating aspect of the process.

"The Magic xpi integration platform takes care of all the difficult data transformations behind the scenes so developers can concentrate on creating the right business processes rather than on the technical complexities," Berger adds.

These ready-made connections made all the difference to the project's success and allowed Segafredo to meet its tight implementation deadline. Segafredo hired Danem in April 2015; the deadline for implementation was Nov. 30, 2015.